


Enoch

by inyron



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Ascension, Gen, Minor Character Death, Off-World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-15
Updated: 2005-12-15
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:43:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inyron/pseuds/inyron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel remembers something from the time he was Ascended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enoch

They had been on the planet for less than two hours when the wormhole started to activate. Jack and Sam exchanged a look and brought up their weapons; Teal’c circled around Daniel and gripped his staff weapon tightly.

But the stargate spit out three ragged looking figures; most notably an ashen-faced girl just a few years older than Cassie, supported on one side by an older woman with gray streaks in her hair, and on the other by a boy just a few years older.

Daniel stepped forward as his teammates relaxed their stances a bit, but before he could call out a word in greeting, the older woman made eye contact with him and stopped short, unbalancing the girl she was helping to hold up, and bringing her to her knees. The girl looked at the four of them with a frightened expression, and tugged on the sleeve of the older woman, but she just kept her eyes on Daniel, her expression slowly turning to one of excitement and wonderment.

“Is it really you?” she asked. “Daniel?”

Jack, who still had his weapon pointing in the general direction of the gate, turned towards Daniel slightly, and raised his eyebrow. Daniel could only shrug his shoulders in response.

* * *

The address for the planet had come to him, not while dreaming, or meditating with Teal’c, but while he was in cafeteria eating Jell-o with Sam. One minute he was teasing her with questions about the apparently bad blind date she’d had the night before, and the next, he was asking her to help him look something up, and they were cross-referencing a gate address in the control room. Daniel felt a bit foolish, not being completely sure whether this was something he was actually remembering from the time he was ascended, or if it was just something random his brain spat at him that he wanted to believe, because he wanted to remember something so much. But while the address didn’t match any on the Abydonian cartouche, it did match with one of the addresses Jack had entered into the system years ago.

It was one they hadn’t been to yet, but by this time, General Hammond had arrived to find out what they were doing, and had immediately ordered a MALP sent through. Sam had asked him, as the address was being dialed, if he had any feeling about what they would find on the other side, but it was just numbers, dry numbers that had floated into his consciousness, and he had no answer for her.

The data the MALP sent back at them was routine and unimpressive; the planet had a desert climate and the type of ruins they’d seen so many other places before. There were no signs of any live people, but there were scuff marks and footprints in the dirt, a group of carefully arranged stones off to one side, and a type of make-shift ladder leaning against the side of one of the walls.

By that time, Jack and Teal’c were there as well, and the General gave the four of them a go for 0900.

* * *

The older woman took a few rapid steps towards Daniel, seemingly mindless of the weapons or the girl and boy struggling behind her.

“I’m Daniel Jackson,” he told her. “Is there any way we can help you?” Sam was putting her weapon down now, walking up to the gate platform. Jack was still staring at the woman suspiciously. 

“Of course,” she said, smiling beatifically. “That’s why we’ve come.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Daniel told her.

Her smile wavered a tiny bit, and Jack cut into the conversation. “So how do you know Daniel, anyway?”

“I’m assuming we have met before,” Daniel said, looking at this woman, trying to remember, as the sun suddenly seemed to shine too bright in his eyes, and the heat beat down oppressively. 

But try as he may, her face remained unfamiliar, even as she responded to Jack in a tone of voice more suited for a child. “Don’t you know who he is?” she asked. “He’s the one that helped my daughter, last season. Damia was dying, of the same disease Pyrena is suffering from.” She gestured, not looking, at the barely-conscious girl lying in front of the gate, Sam and the unknown boy hovering over her anxiously. “Daniel helped her ascend, to move on to another plane of existence.” She was looking at Daniel again, but trying to look back at her burned as much as it would have if he tried to look directly into the sun. “I helped her,” she said. “I helped her, and he was there, glowing like a divine being, and then she- she just turned into this energy.”

The woman was looking away from them now, towards the wall, towards the stones. “She turned into energy,” she repeated, her voice now hushed and low. “Not even a body left behind.”

* * *

Daniel honestly hadn’t known what was going to be on that planet, but there were some things he wasn’t surprised over. Firstly, that the writings they found on the ruins were in Ancient.

Secondly, that they concerned ascension.

“Well?” Jack had asked, after far too short a time for Daniel to have found anything significant.

“I haven’t had enough time to read them all,” Daniel had replied pointedly, “But there’s not all that much text here that’s actually readable. And the stuff that is…” he shrugged. “Stuff we already know, basically. And some extra parables.”

“I am sure,” Teal’c told him, as Jack snorted, “that whatever impulse it was that brought us to this location will prove to be of some value, in the end. Daniel shook his head and walked over to the arrangement of stones. _Grave markers_ , he thought, but nothing was written on them. 

He wanted to find something here, something to prove the worth of the trip, something to justify the fact that this was the planet that his mind came up with, out of all of the invaluable information the depths of his brain must now possess.

He and Teal’c had meditated together, in the early hours before the mission, and Teal’c had cautioned him that he should not look for what he wanted, but what there was to be found, which was something they also agreed also applied to retrieving the memories themselves. Though not looking at all appeared to work sometimes as well.

* * *

“Colonel!” Sam called. “Colonel! She needs medial attention, as soon as possible.”

“Is it almost time?” the woman asked Daniel. The sun faded in its intensity, and he took a deep breath.

“We have doctors,” he told the woman, heading over to the gate. “If you’ll let us take a look at her-”

“No!’ the woman cried. “I brought her here to ascend, just like Damia.”

“Damia?” the girl cried weakly.

“Almost,” the woman responded, following Daniel. “Your savior is here, just hold on a little while longer.”

Daniel blanched. “No. You don’t understand.” 

Sam held the girl’s head in her lap and looked up at Daniel with wide blue eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“She’s dying,” the older woman said.

“I’m ready,” the girl said, and looked at Daniel. “Is that him? Zora, is that him?”

“It is,” Zora said.

“No,” Daniel said, but no one was listening to him. “I can’t save her. You’ve got to get her to a doctor.”

The boy looked up. “We stole her from the doctors,” he said. “Nothing they can do for her now, anyway. The Queen said no one was to go back to this planet, but we stole her and ran. It’s her only hope.”

* * *

Later, when Daniel is helping the boy dig another hole, and set up another rock in the collection, the story will come out of him in more depth. How his people had discovered this place, realized its significance. How generations had sought to understand the writings, interpret them. The boy- Lander, it turns out, was Damia’s sister, Zora’s son, and Pyrena’s friend.

“That one’s for my father.” He points to a large stone in the back. “Spent months and months here. He taught Damia how to read them too, she was always so smart about things like that. I mostly stayed at home with mother. He was the one, actually, that decided, if you want to get ascended, you have to die first, and you have to die here. So when he got sick… it dinna work for him, of course, but you can see that some others thought that they would try it too. And Damia insisted. Mother was the only one with her when it happened. Then she came back, and- well, she didn’t have any proof, or anything, doesn’t leave much behind when your body turns to light. But a lot of people still believed her. 

“It might’ve been better if no one believed. They would’ve left us alone. But the Queen started feeling threatened, you know. She never believed in ascension. She almost had mother brought up on murder charges, but everyone knew Damia was so sick anyway. So she just made it forbidden for anyone else to travel here, to this planet. But Pyrena just begged. She wanted to be with Damia again. Her parents refused, but she just got sicker and sicker, but then mother decided just to take her, and come here. So we came.”

* * *

“No,” Daniel said.

“It’s okay,” Zora said. “This is part of it. We just have to have faith. He’s testing us.” She was moving away from them now, over a corner of the main wall. “You know the teachings.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Daniel asked. “Bring her to the SGC, bring Janet here?” Pyrena moaned piteously, and Daniel felt a stab of resentment in his panic. He knew why she was here, but he was here to- what, stand by helplessly?

Wish he still had the power to change this? Because for all the good he _couldn’t_ do as an ascended being, this was one thing he might have been able to change.

In front of him, the girl groaned again, and Sam touched her face gently. “Hey, what-” Jack was yelling behind him, and to his side, Teal’c was looking at him with concern. But Daniel couldn’t concentrate on any of that, because his vision was whiting out, and suddenly Pyrena was standing before him, smiling and wearing a blue dress.

* * *

And then he saw Damia- or at least he knew it had to be Damia, glowing white, looking stern. “Is it you who determines readiness, or the world?” she asked.

“I-I-” Pyrena stammered looking between Daniel and Damia. “Damia?”

The expression on her face lightened somewhat. “Many believe they deserve enlightenment. Few may actually achieve it.” 

“I’m sorry,” Pyrena whispered. “I didn’t do as much studying as you did.”

“And yet, you have learned much,” Damia responded. She looked at Daniel then, and he looked at her, and tried to remember what he could of Oma Desala, tried to remember this moment in his own life. “We can help you,” she said, turning to Pyrena again. “But the choice on whether or not to take this next step is yours alone.”

Daniel’s vision whited again, and Damia was talking to him. “There are many questions you have to ask,” she said, “and no answers I can give.”

“None?” Daniel asked, and Pyrena was there, then she wasn’t, and Sam was calling his name, and Jack was yelling in the background, and Teal’c was squeezing his shoulder.

“My knowledge is vast as the universe itself, but that which I do not yet know remains infinite.”

“What can you tell me?” Daniel asked, as Pyrena asked a million questions of her own, and started to glow with the answers.

“Your journey is continuing,” she replied. “But that is not what I wanted to tell you.”

“What, then?” Daniel asked, vision whitening out again as Pyrena transformed and vanished.

“Is it you who determines readiness, or the world?” Damia asked, but she wasn’t looking at Daniel any longer.

Zora stood before them, wearing a beautiful gold dress, and the same smile as when she first saw Daniel. “Darling,” she said. “My darling girl.”

Damia looked at her impassively. “Many believe they deserve enlightenment,” she said. “Few may actually achieve it. What do you come before me in search of?” 

“You,” her mother replied.

Daniel could hear a boy screaming in the background.

“I’ve always been here,” Damia said, but her mother was gone.

“What,” Daniel asked carefully, “did you want to tell me?”

She looked at Daniel again, and he wondered if the expression on Oma’s face was always that stark. “Thank you,” she said.

* * *

“Daniel Jackson. DanielJackson.”

“Teal’c?” 

“Do you require assistance?” Teal’c’s arm on him was steadying, and he blinked up at the gate to see neither Sam, Pyrena, or the boy in front of it. “The girl was successful in her bid for ascension,” Teal’c said, a whisper of reverence in his voice.

The crying continued behind him. He nodded slightly at Teal’c. “But Zora was not.”

* * *

They had more people from the SGC come and photograph all the ruins later, after Lander had left to take his chances back with his planet’s government. As Daniel had predicted, there wasn’t much new information to be gotten from the writings, and further surveys of the planet showed there to be nothing much left but a wasteland.

They packed up to go home, Jack already insisting they all come over to unwind at his house, with pizza and beers and hockey games. Daniel agreed readily, then agreed more reluctantly to join Teal’c for more meditation the next morning. He wasn’t sure he was ready for more of what his brain had to throw at him, but Teal’c had resolute in his belief that they needed to center themselves, and reflect on recent events. And in the meantime, Daniel had one complicated mission report to write.

The sun was still beating down on them hard as they entered the earthbound wormhole, but Daniel held back for a moment after his teammates entered, to briefly stand in the cold gust of air that seemed to come out of nowhere to sweep down on him.


End file.
